Advanced Review

Pupillometry
Sylvain Sirois1∗ and Julie Brisson2

Pupillometry is the study of changes in the diameter of the pupil as a function of

cognitive processing. This review paper provides a brief historical overview of the
study of pupillometry in cognitive science. The physiology of pupillary responses is
introduced, leading to an outline of early pupillometry work, which began with the
seminal work of Hess and Polt in the 1960s. The paper then presents a broad review
of contemporary research in cognitive sciences that relies on pupillometry. This
review is organized around five general domains, namely perception, language
processing, memory and decision making, emotion and cognition, and cognitive
development. In order to illustrate the nature of the method, and the challenges of
analysis, the next section of the review details the process of compiling, processing,
and analyzing data from a simple, typical pupillometry study. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons,
Ltd.

How to cite this article:

WIREs Cogn Sci 2014, 5:679–692. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1323

INTRODUCTION pupil dilates when participants are in conditions of

T he pupil is the opening of the iris that permits
light to enter the eye and reach the retina, thus
allowing vision. In humans and many animals (but not
all, e.g., domestic cats), the pupil is circular in shape.
The diameter of the pupil is controlled by two sets of
smooth muscles in the iris. Sphincter or constrictor
muscles decrease its diameter, while dilator muscles
increase it. The function of such changes in diameter
is to modulate the amount of light that reaches the
retina, thus optimizing vision. In relatively darker
conditions, the pupil dilates, whereas it constricts in
relatively brighter conditions. This is known as the
pupillary light reflex, and has clinical use as alterations
in pupil function can indicate neurological or drug
intoxication problems. The use of a penlight by
medical staff assessing a patient reflects such clinical
utility.
For over 50 years now, researchers have been
interested in the fact that changes in pupil diameter
can index cognitive functioning.1 Coarsely put, the
∗ Correspondence to: sylvain.sirois@uqtr.ca
1 Département de Psychologie, Université du Québec à Trois-
Rivières, Trois-Rivières, QC, Canada
2 Laboratoire Psy-NCA (EA 4700), Université de Rouen,
Mont-Saint-Aignan, France
Conflict of interest: The authors have declared no conflicts of
interest for this article.
increased attention or cognitive load, or of emotional
or cognitive arousal. Pupillometry is the study of such
changes in pupil diameter as a function of cognitive
activity. In this paper, we provide a brief historical
background to the rationale behind pupillometry.
We then discuss the physiology and psychology of
task-evoked changes in pupil diameter. A review of
recent work using pupillometry, across a range of
domains within the cognitive sciences, highlights the
scope and utility of the method. Finally, we discuss
methods of data collection and analysis involved
in pupillometry. Sample data are used to highlight
different approaches to analysis.
A BRIEF HISTORY
BEFORE PSYCHOLOGY
Interest in the eye and the pupil goes back to antiquity.
Eyes have been described as the ‘window to the
soul’; this citation is frequently attributed to Cicero
(106–47 BCE), a roman politician. The word pupil
comes from the Latin ‘pupilla’, which means ‘little
doll’ because of the small reflected images one can see
when looking in the eyes of another person.2 The size
variation of the pupil was also well known, as well
as its relevance in various domains. Galen, a roman
physician (129–216 CE), used plants to dilate pupils
during cataract surgery. Courtesans in Italian medieval

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 Advanced Review
times also used a substance, atropine (extracted from
the plant atropa belladonna), in order to dilate their
pupils and appear more attractive when they were
courting.
Several physicists such as Archimedes (287–212
BCE) and Galileo (1564–1642) developed specific
methods to determine pupil size using cylinders or
rectangular pieces of paper, respectively.2,3 Over time,
different tools were used to improve direct observation
such as compass, reticles, crosshairs, and other optical
devices, or even black circle templates to find the best
match with the actual size of the pupil.2,4 Some of
these tools were connected to recording devices such
as kymographs.
The advent of image capture on a light sensi-
tive support allowed researchers to work offline on
still images of the pupil.4–8 To improve measure-
ment accuracy across lighting conditions, ultraviolet
radiations then infrared sensitive photography were
used.2 Improvements such as increased number of pic-
tures per second through cinematographic methods9
allowed timeline representations of pupil size varia-
tions that were called ‘pupillograms’.2 These graphics
were the result of a tedious and time consuming pro-
cess. Researchers had to develop every picture, project
each frame on a screen, and then measure the pupil size
with a compass or a ruler. Considerable efforts were
made in order to automate acquisition of pupil diam-
eter data (see Ref 10 for a detailed explanation; see
also Ref 4). Pupillometry methods expanded with the
arrival of eye tracking devices. Eye trackers are quite
accurate and allow monocular or binocular online
automatic recording. They do not require observer
coding before analyzing data, which is more objective
and also saves time.
PHYSIOLOGY OF PUPIL DILATION
AND CONSTRICTION
In dark ambient conditions, the pupil tends to dilate
whereas in bright conditions, it tends to constrict.
This is called the pupillary light reflex, and was
first reported by Rhazes (850–923 CE), the Persian
polymath.2 The light reflex is the main potential
confound in cognitive pupillometry. The luminance
of every aspect of the experimental conditions has
to be controlled before collecting data (experimental
cubicle, stimuli, inter-stimuli luminance), because light
emitted or reflected by a particular area will affect
pupil diameter. Luminance is typically measured in
candela per square meter (cd/m2 ) units.
Pupil diameter can vary from 1.5 to 9 mm, and
reacts to stimulation in about 200 ms.11 In standard
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light conditions, pupil size is about 3 mm.12 Varia-
tions of pupil size are caused by two smooth muscles
in the iris: the sphincter (or constrictor) and dilator
pupillae. The dilator muscle is under adrenergic con-
trol (sympathetic system) from the superior sympa-
thetic ganglion. The sphincter pupillae is innervated by
cholinergic fibers of the parasympathetic system from
the Edinger–Westphal nucleus.13,14 Therefore, dilation
can be attributed to the activation of the sympathetic
system, leading to the stimulation of the dilator mus-
cle, and a parallel inhibitory parasympathetic mecha-
nism.
Pupillary response induced by cognitive load
is tightly linked to locus coeruleus (LC) neuron
activation.1,15,16 The LC is a subcortical structure, and
is the conductor of the noradrenergic system in the
whole brain.1,17,18 The LC and norepinephric system
(LC–NE) are involved in different processes includ-
ing stress variations, memory retrieval,19 or selective
attention,20 on top of general functions such as arousal
and the sleep-wake cycle.21,22
This close connection has been shown by use
of single-cell recording technique in monkeys, high-
lighting the correspondence between the baseline fir-
ing rate of a LC neuron and pupil size.23,24 Therefore,
researchers use task-evoked pupil dilation as an index
of activity in the LC–NE system.1 In fact, recent work
uniquely highlights the close relationship between the
LC–NE system and pupil diameter changes, relating
pupil dilation to fMRI recording of the LC.25
Researchers have shown that the LC dis-
plays two main activation profiles: tonic and phasic
modes.17,26 Gilzenrat et al.27 suggested those two
modes are two ends of a continuum. The phasic
mode has neurons firing rapidly to optimize perfor-
mance during a specific task, to focus attention on
an ‘exploitation’ mode. This LC activation leads to
rapid pupil dilation. The tonic mode, conversely, is
more efficient in sustained processing. This mode is
associated with an elevated baseline firing rate in the
LC. It promotes disengagement from the task and
diffuse ‘exploration’.1,27,28
PSYCHOLOGY AND PUPILLOMETRY
(A BRIEF HISTORY)
Researchers in ophthalmology and optometry have
been aware of pupil behavior for a long time. As
far as psychology is concerned, interest in pupillom-
etry is more recent. Even though tasked-evoked pupil
responses from psychological effects were noticed in
the 1760s, understanding of this phenomenon was
lacking.13 Many early studies were single case studies
on clinical patients.9 Berrien and Huntington29 used a
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 WIREs Cognitive Science
short-focused telescope moved by an observer with an
infrared lamp and head rest device to assess the emo-
tional effect of lying. They showed a specific pattern
of slow dilation—quick constriction associated with
deception. Other significant early works in psychology
were Hess and Polt’s studies30,31 showing, respectively,
the relevance of the pupil as an index of specific inter-
est or mental load.
Ensuing studies showed that pupil size varia-
tions could be considered an index of arousal and
implicit processing. Women display relatively larger
pupil dilation when they look at pictures of babies,
mothers with a baby, or nude males than to other
pictures of people, whereas heterosexual men’s pupils
were larger when they looked at pictures of naked
women.30 Interest in pictures of the opposite sex was
replicated.32 In a similar study, Hess et al.33 showed
that homosexual men selectively displayed pupil dila-
tion when they looked at nude male pictures. Pupil
dilation as a function of participants’ idiosyncratic
interests was also found with food and taste,34,35 and
music.34 Researchers discussed the impact of negative
stimuli on pupil size with contradictory results (see
Ref 13 for details). Although some researchers sug-
gested that negatively valenced stimuli could constrict
the pupil,34 these results were likely due to luminance
confounds, as psychological effects on pupil diameter
are exclusively linked to dilation,36 owing to the phys-
iology of the LC–NE system.1
On a sensory level, however, pupil dilation in
reaction to painful stimuli has been known for a
long time.37 Indeed, pupil dilation appears a sensitive,
analog index of pain perception, reflecting intensity
of noxious stimulation, and also sensitive to gender
differences identified in typical verbal reports from
pain studies.38 Chapman et al.39 related similar pupil
dilation effects to noxious stimuli to peak latency and
brain evoked potentials. This effect appears robust to
a degree of variation in ambient luminance.40
In parallel to these studies using pupil variation
to assess arousal and emotional responses, researchers
also noticed the relevance of pupillometry to index
mental load. In one of their first studies, Hess and
Polt31 asked participants to solve multiplications. The
more difficult the problems, the more pupil diameter
increased. The impact of cognitive load in mental
arithmetic tasks was replicated in several studies.41–44
It was also found in other areas such as sustained
attention processing,45,46 working memory,47–49 and
decision making.50
Some general and methodological concerns must
be taken into account when designing pupillome-
try tasks. First, while pupil size can double due to
luminance variations, changes due to cognitive load
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Pupillometry
or arousal are rarely larger than 0.5 mm.51 Second,
although pupillary responses are generally involuntar-
ily, people can learn to induce pupil dilation by men-
tally manipulating their thoughts (e.g., thinking about
sexual images or doing mental arithmetic, see Refs 1
and 52). However, people cannot inhibit pupil reac-
tion to stimuli.36 Third, when fatigue develops, the
average size of the pupil decreases and begins to fluctu-
ate remarkably.27,53 Thus, conceiving a pupillometry
task requires that researchers pay attention to many
details that can cause pupil diameter fluctuations inde-
pendently of the study purpose,13 on the top of lumi-
nance and drug effects.
It must finally be noted that some eye trackers
introduce errors in pupil size estimation as a function
of gaze position.54 Indeed, pupil size is estimated from
2D video images, and as the point of gaze moves
away from the camera, the viewed pupil will shift from
circular to elliptical, and thus compensation must be
made in the estimation of its diameter. Fortunately,
such errors are systematic, and relatively easy to assess
and correct.55
CURRENT USES OF PUPILLOMETRY
Use of pupillometry in current research is broad in
scope. Given the size of the literature, as well as space
constraints, we favored breadth over depth, and have
organized our review around the general themes of
perception, language processing, memory and deci-
sion making, emotions, and cognitive development.
We ignore the substantial literatures outside the cog-
nitive sciences, especially those associated with human
factors (e.g., driving) and clinical/medical assessment.
Perception
Top-down effects of perception can be revealed
through pupillometry. The pupillary light reflex can
be artificially created by showing pictures containing
the sun, even if the luminance of the picture is manip-
ulated in such a way that it should otherwise produce
dilation.56 Generally, the illusion or suggestion of
brightness decreases the diameter of the pupil.57 In
one particular study, the constriction of the pupil to
natural images containing the sun was largest when
images were presented upright, compared to upside
down, despite constant luminance between otherwise
identical images.58 In a second study, the authors
replicate the effect with sun and moon, but report
greater constriction to the sun despite controlling
for luminance. Interestingly, the pupil does not only
adjust as a function of the luminance and complexity
of visual fields, but also to instructed imaginary levels
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of luminance and complexity while participant look
at an empty background.59 In fact, changes in pupil
diameter do not appear to reflect low-level attentional
processes such as the orienting reflex.60 However,
an unpredictable context (such as sound cues) can
modulate pupil diameter during visual processing.61
The subliminal mere exposure effect (SMEE),
where participants are familiarized to stimuli they
cannot consciously perceive (and subsequently pre-
fer those arbitrarily familiar stimuli), can also be
assessed through pupillometry. Participants’ pupils
dilated significantly more to stimuli when those had
been SMEE-induced than not.62 Pupillometry is also
a useful index of visual processing in the attentional
blink task, which assesses whether participants notice
the second of two stimuli presented in rapid suc-
cession. So called blinks, as well as correct perfor-
mance. is indexed by both the latency and amplitude
of the pupil response.63 As well, pupil diameter has
been shown to vary as a function of the size of the
action-perception congruency effect in visual atten-
tion in an action-planning task.64 Action-congruency
effects are those where perceptual performance is
enhanced by responses that are congruent with the
stimuli (e.g., grasping rather than pointing at tar-
gets). Current research also examines the relation of
pupil diameter to working memory load during visual
search tasks, using the former to predict the latter.65
In the case of inattentional blindness (IB), where par-
ticipants fail to notice a salient stimulus that is not rel-
evant to the primary task they perform, pupil dilation
proved a useful measure of cognitive load associated
with the primary task, but unrelated to IB per se.66
Relatedly, pupillometry data supports the hypothesis
that processing speed training increases the efficiency
of attentional resource allocation.67 Generally, pupil-
lometry is considered discriminately sensitive to dif-
ferent components of attention, based on the onset,
acceleration, or duration of dilation events.68 In other
words, the delay, speed, and length of a change in pupil
diameter index various aspects of attention. A similar
usefulness of pupil dilation to the study of attention
has been observed before stimulus onset (thus, antic-
ipation) by manipulating asynchrony between target
and distractor stimuli in a flanker task,69 a procedure
that measures response inhibition.
Language Processing
Pupil dilation as a marker of cognitive load is further
revealed in studies of language, especially as a dynamic
marker of processing.70 For instance, pupil diameter
appears to be a quadratic function of speech intelligi-
bility, reaching peak values at medium levels of inter-
ference, and tapering off thereafter as intelligibility
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decreases.71 Generally, pupil diameter proves a reli-
able index to various alterations to verbal language,72
including alterations due to hearing loss.73 Similarly,
pupil dilation indexes the difficulty of word retrieval
in bilingual participants, correlating with both word
frequency and neighborhood density,74 with a similar
effect observed in toddlers.75 Interestingly, increased
pupil diameter appears to predict the wandering of
attention during reading tasks.76 In an interesting
study on poetry, researchers found increased pupil
dilation to rhythm violations but not to other viola-
tions such as semantic, syntactic, or metric.77
Memory and Decision Making
Pupillometry has been shown to exhibit unique and
distinct properties from eye gaze data in decision
making tasks. In difficult decision making circum-
stances, pupil dilation predicts decision thresholds,
when a choice is made, whereas eye gaze is a better
predictor of decision drift, or the unfolding in time
of the decision process.78 Importantly, pupil dilation
appears to index the processes involved in decision
making, rather than the outcome,79 including con-
flict resolution.80 Specifically, it appears particularly
sensitive to reward cues.81 Indeed, learners in a gam-
bling task showed enhanced pupil dilation to uncer-
tainty, relative to feedback magnitude,82 and simi-
larly to changes in reward contingencies.83 It also dis-
tinguishes the processing load involved in planning
relative to online information processing.84 Further-
more, pupil dilation can reflect the interaction between
emotion and cognition, as was shown in analogi-
cal reasoning.85 This effect appears to be indepen-
dent of the impact of processing load per se on pupil
diameter.86
The usefulness of pupillometry for memory
research is increasingly highlighted.87 For example,
pupil diameter reflects the relative value of items stud-
ied in a word recall task, independent of gaze fixa-
tion to the items.88 Some work suggests that pupil-
lary effects reflect retrieval rather than encoding,89,90
but other research has shown a link between pupil
dilation and item encoding.91,92 Generally, however,
pupil dilation is thought to index the strength of the
memory.93–95 The relationship with pupil diameter
can also reflect stress levels during encoding.96
Emotion and Cognition
Pupillometry is a useful and reliable measure of parti-
cipants’ responses to emotional stimuli. Pupil dilation
can be observed when participants view arousing (pos-
itive or negative) relative to neutral images.97 Changes
in pupil diameter discriminate whether participants
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were touched by a human hand relative to similar
mechanical pressure, an effect enhanced by smiling
from the human performing the touching.98 Similarly,
pupil dilation is enhanced in face to face interac-
tions when participants are aware that others gaze at
their own eyes.99 Face processing reveals a correlation
between pupil diameter and pleasantness ratings,100
and has been further shown to be modulated by exper-
imental exposure to the hormone oxytocin.101 Pupil
dilation can also be modulated by sexual orientation
when viewing erotic images.102
Pupillometry further reveals sustained pro-
cessing of emotional faces in depressed relative to
non-depressed participants,103 as well as the general
ability to discriminate emotional states from faces104
and bodily expressions of emotion.105,106 Further-
more, pupil dilation can index illusory correlations
following aversive learning.107 Participants showed
largest dilation to cues that predicted the larger levels
of aversiveness rather than the likelihood of aversive
stimulation. Pupil dilation can also be used to index
abnormal light sensitivity in participants with sea-
sonal affective disorder (SAD), which further varies
as a function of two distinct genotypes related to the
melanopsin gene.108
Cognitive Development
The use of pupillometry in infancy research experi-
enced resurgence in the late 2000s, some 40 years after
Fitzgerald and colleagues’ pioneering work.109,110
Sirois and Jackson showed how pupil dilation is sen-
sitive to perceptual dynamics in typical Violation of
Expectation (VoE) studies with infants,111,112 provid-
ing an alternative to looking time measures, which
are coarser. Pupillometry has also been used to exam-
ine the development of intentional actions in 7- and
12-month-olds.113 The utility of pupillometry for
infant studies has also been shown in the area of
social cognition, where infants show increased pupil
diameters when shown irrational social actions, rel-
ative to rational ones,114 with sensitivity to contex-
tual constraints.115 Similarly, infants’ processing of
emotional faces reflects the type of parental expo-
sure, whereby larger pupil diameter was associated
with neutral images of the parent who is not the
primary caregiver.116 Generally, pupil dilation reflects
emotional processing in infants,117 and can be used
to track its development.118 For example, pupillom-
etry has been used to study (and reveal) empathy in
2-year-olds.119 In adolescents, it has been shown to
reflect the physiological response to peer rejection.120
Pupillometry has recently been used to
study atypical development as well. For example,
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Pupillometry
2-year-olds with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD)
have been shown to have greater tonic and phasic
pupil dilation on visual search tasks than typically
developing (TD) controls, suggesting enhanced atten-
tional focus.121 Similarly, pupil dilation effects have
been shown for social relative to non-social stimuli,
whereby TD children aged 4 exhibit significantly
larger pupils than ASD children.122 The ability to
discriminate children with ASD from TD controls
with pupillometry has been shown as late as aged 10
years.123
DATA PROCESSING AND ANALYSIS
Pupil diameter is a continuous variable expressed over
time. In cognitive science research, the aim is to eval-
uate fluctuations of this variable as a function of
time-locked events (e.g., picture or sound onset, or
specific events at precise times in video or real-world
sequences). This can lead to experiments where sub-
stantial data is collected on individual trials, especially
when using eye tracking equipment at a high sampling
rate. In the vast majority of cases, various steps in data
processing are required before analyses are conducted.
In this section, we discuss data from a simple yet typ-
ical experiment that should induce task-evoked pupil-
lary responses. The aim is to illustrate processing and
analyses of pupil data, in the form of a step-by-step
example.
One of the authors provides online access to
sample data and analysis software for instructional
purposes (http://www.uqtr.ca/∼siroiss/pupillometry).
The data is from eight adults (5 female, 3 male,
aged between 21 and 42) who took part in the
pseudo-experiment shown in Figure 1. They were
asked to carry out mental arithmetic on the six addi-
tion problems illustrated, with 10 seconds allowed
on each trial. All problems required that participants
add three-digit numbers and report the sum out
loud. Easy problems were designed so that no carry
operation was required for any column (units, tens,
or hundreds). The answer can be easily verbalized
by performing the sum left to right. Conversely, hard
problems introduced a carry operation on all three
columns. Thus, participants had to carry sums right
to left, with three instances of carry, and remem-
ber all three sums in order to produce the verbal
answer, which required assembling these sums left
to right. It is expected that the cognitive load on
such problems, relative to the easy ones, would yield
differences in pupil diameter. All participants saw
the same sequence of problems, alternating easy and
hard ones.
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Easy problems
267 528 354
+122 +211 +625
= = = pants looked at the fixation cross. Figure 3 plots the
Hard problems
549 497 721
+793 +856 +489
= = =
FIGURE 1 | The six arithmetic problems shown in the
pseudo-experiment.
Data were collected using a Tobii T120 eye
tracker (Tobii Technology, Stockholm, Sweden), run-
ning at 60Hz, with a built-in 34 × 28 cm screen (reso-
lution set at 1280 × 1024 pixels, 60 Hz refresh rate),
located in a dimly lit, soundproofed cubicle. On each
trial, a fixation cross was presented at the center of
the screen, and remained there until the participant
had fixated on it for at least 100 consecutive millisec-
onds. It was followed by an addition problem, which
remained on screen for 10 seconds, and then a 2 sec-
ond blank screen until the next trial. There were thus
600 samples collected on each trial, plus a variable
number of samples associated with the fixation cross
(depending how long participants took to fixate for
the minimum duration).
Raw data from the six trials, limited to the 10
seconds when the problems were displayed, are shown
in Figure 2. This figure highlights three difficulties in
the use of pupillometry data. First, the scatterplots
highlight the large quantity of data to be summarized
even in such a short, simple task, with few partici-
pants. Second, there are gaps in the data when partic-
ipants blink, or briefly move their heads in such a way
that the eye tracker fails to find the eye and estimate,
among other things, pupil diameter. Finally, partici-
pants differ in their baseline pupil diameters. In this
dataset, there appear to be two subsets of participants,
clustered around 3 and 4 mm diameter.
For missing data samples, we have favored a
method of regressing each eye onto the other, apply-
ing a low-pass filter (4 Hz) to remove jittering, and
using linear interpolation for samples where data are
missing from both eyes111 (see also Refs 51, 85, 124).
The issue of variable baseline diameter between par-
ticipants is addressed by subtracting a pre-trial base-
line value, such that data is transformed into relative
changes in pupil diameter, which standardizes partic-
ipants at (or near) zero at the onset of trials.97,99,125
This reduces variability from absolute values, which
is both statistically useful and practically relevant
for assessing changes in pupil size as a function of
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independent variables. For these data, we took the
unweighted mean diameter from the last six samples
(100 ms) before the onset of each trial, while partici-
mean change in pupil diameter for easy and hard prob-
lems, following these procedures of linear interpola-
tion of missing samples and baseline correction.
Eyeballing the descriptive data in Figure 3 sug-
gests that, as expected, hard problems involve a more
important and sustained cognitive load than easy
problems. While the latter show a slow, steady decline
in arousal, the former exhibit relatively increased, sus-
tained arousal for the duration of the trial. An out-
standing question is how to analyze the data. A com-
mon approach is to average pupil diameter values
within arbitrary time windows at specific times fol-
lowing an event.99,117,118,126 With this example data,
we could use a repeated-measures ANOVA with prob-
lem type (easy or hard) and, for example, time since
the problem onset (0, 2, 4, 6, or 8 seconds) as indepen-
dent variables, in order to look at the effect of problem
type over the course of a trial. As a dependent variable,
we could arbitrarily take the median pupil diameter
within 100 ms after each of those five time points. The
results of this data reduction are shown in Figure 4.
The analysis identifies a significant interac-
tion between time and problem type (F(4,4) = 4.418,
p = 0.007), as well as significant main effects for
both time (F(4,4) = 15.715, p = 0.0) and problem type
(F(4,4) = 9.768, p = 0.017). Polynomial decomposition
of the interaction suggests significant linear, cubic,
and quartic relationships, whereas the effect of time
is both linear and quadratic. These results are con-
sistent with the general impression derived from
looking at the data in Figure 3. They are particu-
larly impressive given the small sample size, which
suggests both a robust effect and the relative advan-
tage of repeated-measures over independent groups.
Alternatively, in many cases, researchers carry out
pairwise comparisons on critical intervals.94,114 If
we replace the ANOVA with pairwise comparisons
of type at each time interval, we find a significant
difference only at 6 and 8 seconds post-stimulus onset
(ts > 3.57, ps < 0.01), and in the case of the difference
at 6 seconds (the most ‘convincing’ in Figure 4), it
barely remains significant after Bonferroni correction,
meaning that in experiments where effects may be
subtle, many false negatives may be reported. The
common approach of reducing rich data to discreet
values at arbitrary intervals, illustrated here, and the
added problem of multiple statistical tests, is in our
view a weak use of pupillometry data.
We favor an approach based on functional
data analysis,127 where temporal pupillometry data is
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FIGURE 2 | Raw pupil data from participants for each of the problems shown.

0.1
Easy
Hard
0.05
Average change in pupil diameter (mm)

–0.05

–0.1

–0.15

–0.2

–0.25

–0.3

–0.35

–0.4
1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000 7000 8000 9000 10000
Time after problem onset (ms)

FIGURE 3 | Average change from baseline in pupil diameter, as a function of problem type.

transformed into curve functions (typically b-splines),
and where statistical analyses are performed on those
very functions.55,111,112 One main advantage of this
approach is that all of the data are used, rather than
an arbitrary subset summarized to discreet values.
Another, significant advantage is that while the orig-
inal data is a function of time, so are the outcomes
of statistical tests. For example, a t-test is not a single
value but a curve function, which can be expressed
over time, allowing us to examine if and when it
exceeds the significance threshold. Such properties
remove the unfortunate arbitrariness found in com-
mon approaches.
For example, we computed the difference
between hard and easy problems from baseline
corrected data for each participant (which would

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0.1
Easy
Hard
Average pupil diameter change from baseline 0.05

–0.05

–0.1

–0.15

–0.2

–0.25

–0.3

–0.35
0 2000 4000 6000 8000
Time from stimulus onset (ms)

FIGURE 4 | Median pupil diameter change from baseline at various time points, as a function of problem type.

0.3
Mean pupil diameter difference (hard-easy) in mm

0.2

0.1

–0.1
1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000 7000 8000 9000 10000
Time (ms)

FIGURE 5 | Mean baseline-correct pupil diameter change subtracting easy from hard, transformed into functional (b-spline) object. The overlaid
dashed curve is the raw mean difference between easy and hard.

illustrate how relatively more difficult hard prob- initial peak of arousal favoring hard problems at
lems were), and transformed these differences into about 200 ms, participants were similarly aroused
b-splines following the procedures outlined in Jackson as they processed the problems, but from about
and Sirois.111 The average spline is shown in Figure 5, 4200 ms until 8750 ms following stimulus onset,
along with the average difference from raw data. The arousal to hard problems was significantly greater
splines introduce a degree of smoothing, but capture than to easy problems. This simple interpretation was
the shape of the original data. achieved without discarding any data, nor with any
A single-sample t-test can be performed on arbitrary decision about when to look for differences.
these functions, comparing the differences to the We feel that the functional analysis route should be
null hypothesis of 0. The result of this test is also preferred over the common approaches found in the
a function, and is depicted in Figure 6. A narrative literature. Of course, this is not the only approach
interpretation of this figure would be that after an in the literature, and while we favor and thus use it,

686 © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Volume 5, November/December 2014
 WIREs Cognitive Science
2
t-test value
–1
–2
–3
1000 2000 3000
FIGURE 6 | Functional t -test of the difference between hard and easy problems. Solid horizontal lines represent the two-tailed critical value for t .
interested readers can also look at alternatives such
as a recent one based on deconvolution.128
CONCLUSIONS
Pupillometry as a formal research tool and object
of study within psychology and cognitive sciences
has been around for barely 50 years, since the sem-
inal work of Hess and Polt in the 1960s.1 In those
five decades, many technological and methodological
advancements (including fast, consumer-level comput-
ers) have turned a tedious, expensive process into one
that is relatively easy to carry out and non-invasive.
Low cost and Do-It-Yourself eye tracking solutions,
as well as open-source software, means that the tools
are not only available to well-endowed laboratories,
but researchers with modest means can also make use
of the method. This bodes well for the future.
As our review has shown, pupillometry is widely
used across the disciplines that comprise cognitive sci-
ence. It is particularly well suited to particular research
questions, such as implicit processing, and other pro-
cesses not easily amenable to verbal report or simpler
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